Sorry but I disagree. what we need is to transition from timer house frames to steel ones and that would mean we'd husband the available timber and crank up the steel production and rust belt jobs, here in this country!

Apart from that, there is bamboo as a very fast-growing timber replacement, with the strength of high tensile steel. And also equally fast-growing cannite as a substitute for softwood timber for the paper industry. Moreover, we need to recycle the chemicals used to make paper, so they stay out of the environment.

Mud bricks as a cladding material and termite mounds as the binding material worked for our forebears. Why not us!? Given their thermal qualities.

Forests should continue to be selectively logged to ensure they're well managed and continue to supply cabinet timers etc. And routinely grazed by goat herds to ensure the available fuel load is seriously reduced/kept in check!

New plantations need to be a mixture of fine cabinet timbers and need maximum management to ensure they reach production maturity and maximised returns on investment and land use

Steel house frames are termite proof and if surrounded by steel colourbond fences? Much more resistant to fire! As are steel power poles/fence posts!
Alan B.

Come on mate. The bulk of native forest harvesting was going to woodchip. We went from 1:2 coupes to 1:7. I've spoken to native forest harvesters on site who admitted how much the industry had changed and it was pretty obvious they weren't happy about it. Structural hardwood was very much a by-product of the woodchip industry rather than the other way around.

That is what caused so many people to kick up about this and you studiously avoid discussing it. Why is that?

Once again the shortage of resources in this case timber is because of too many people in the world.

Business needs to find ways to sustain businesses differently. Ayn Rand talks about the production of value being represented in terms of human life. A sandwich represents about 4 hours of life.

Obviously this discounts the value of other life- so what percentage of the Earth should human's occupy? But this is a slight diversion.

A bag of wheat represents so many days of a person's food. A house represents so many years of a person's shelter. A nation that has less resources can build houses that last longer by thinking carefully about the supply chain and BPM- hence creating more life. Of course this creates a new problem- competition in the building industry- as less houses are built- less people to buy houses due to less jobs- but less people need to work. It's a complex problem. It also means excess capacity that can potentially take on work in other fields.

There was an experiment in the 90's Biodome II that sought to create a self sustainable environment for six people. Jane Poynter said that although there were issues with Carbon Dioxide they knew how to fix the issues in principle but the bigger issues were human psychology.

Of course the Biodome project was only sustainable in terms of consumables perhaps not in sustaining or building the Biodome itself- to do so the scale of the problem would be magnified exponentially.

This all starts to sound like a planned society in a sense similar to a Communist utopia- but village communities in the US between the wars were somewhat self sustainable as were many places of the time in British Australia- something that we as descendants should be proud of.

Due to our excess productivity we grew quickly in the early 1800's. Growth gives meaning to many cultures- on a finite planet this isn't sustainable- it could be a symptom of having the need to be entertained and having an external locus of identity- a pathological need for change and novelty.

The bulk of native forest harvesting was going to woodchip.
SteeleRedux,
Sadly, you're right. It's to satisfy the insatiable demand by Bureaucracy, conveyor belt educational Degree production & utterly unnecessary pamphlets by the consumer advocates.

It is bloody ridiculous that a country the size of Australia has to buy in timber, because a few politicians want to try to buy green preferences.

Steele Redux.
Saying that sawn timber is a by-product of the woodchipping industry is like saying that steak is a by-product of the cattle offal, bone, and hide industry; or that gold is a by-product of the quartz industry.

It is common-place for the highest quality and most valuable product to form the minority of what is overturned in trying to find it, and it reflects the growth characteristics of eucalypts which are frequently crooked, or full of internal defect due to rot or past fires.

Furthermore, the predominance of woodchip product has grown since sawmills stopped burning the considerable off-cuts that are generated in turning round logs into rectangular boards. For many years now these have also been chipped and sent to a pulp processor or for export.

In terms of the proportion of logs produced in the bush and sent for sawmilling versus pulp, the best coupes still yield between 50:50 and 37:63 in favour of pulp. But, because most of the best forests have been reserved, in places like East Gippsland, the remaining industry has been forced into poor quality coastal forests where the sawlog component can be pretty low. This is largely out of the control of state forestry agencies, and no wonder those in the industry get upset about it.

Dear Mark,

Sorry mate but that really isn't going to wash. The Greater Otway National Park was mostly won by the Otway Ranges Environmental Network clearly showing that the native forest timber industry was primarily driven by woodchips. Producers didn't have to mill it, dry it or dress it before onselling it. It went straight to the quay in Corio and as soon as another full bulk carrier slipped the ropes to Japan the money was in the account.

During the RFA process for Western Victoria the figures were presented by OREN and interrogated by the panel members who ultimately acknowledged the fact of what was occurring.

The native forest workers I spoke to were not happy because what was in their eyes good timber was going to the chipper because of very minor defects. A bit of bushfire black proving too much of a visual (not structural) blemish. Or increases in minimum lengths requiring the rejection of tonnes of timber which in the past would have gone to the saw mills.

The industry repeatedly rejected selective logging, especially by wire extraction claiming it was too unsafe for workers and that clearfelling was the only viable option. After the RFA it suddenly became matter of course.

The native forest timber industry has been pulled up primarily because of greedy operators and deservedly so. A hell of a lot of taxpayer money was foregone to support a plantation industry.

Of course now the figure on export volumes of wood chips have been redacted as of last year. But we do know the hardwood volumes harvested Australia wide in 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 were at record levels. Hardly indicative of your claim of "diminishing local supply obtainable from our own forests".

And this comment from you is unsupported by any of the literature I have seen: "the decline of the native hardwood industry is widely acknowledged as a significant factor in the increasing incidence of mega-bushfires over the past twenty-years"

Care to back it up?

A mate of mine has a couple of hundred acres near Torballea. It was part of a mining lease when the area was the main source of coal for Queensland rail.

The entire place, along with hundreds of acres in the area, was clear felled for pit prop timbers for the mines. About 20 acres was used for a citrus orchard, & the rest allowed to regrow at natures whim, apart from regular fires to control woody weeds that make bush fires dangerous. He could graze about 1 cow to 20 acres in the thickish timber.

Due to the clear felling, everything grew in the first good season. He now has a couple of hundred acres of telegraph polls. Competition forced saplings grow straight & tall. The coppers log telegraph poll factory wanted his logs, & he let them send in a team. After a couple of acres he found he was getting $8 a log & sent them away.

The sight of his timber proved to me, that in that area at least, clear felling will produce the best replacement growth forest.

Hasbeen- With respect it appears that most of the wood is going overseas not to Australia. That's one of the problems with global resources markets- resources are sold at world prices. The same happened to the meat market in the 90's. Both sides of politics because they are based on Locke Liberal principles believe in a borderless world of free trade, free movement of people, etc.

So poverty can occur done the road from the largest food producers- decoupling local business from local community health.

This is one of the reasons I'm unsure about Ayn Rand's radical free trade- some have called it anarcho-capitalism- but perhaps she didn't envisage global trade in it's modern embodiment in 1957.

As the Conservative Benjamin Franklin said- The health of the people is linked to the health of the nation not for reasons of charity but because businesses need labour in order to produce. The same could be said of a skilled workplace in the computer age. It all sort of echo's the "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith.

One of the particular issues in Australia is the large percentage of land in Arid and Semi-Arid status. From memory 95% of Australia is Arid- it seems to be reflected by Australia (the driest continent) having a population that is 15x smaller than the USA.

There is a rain line in Australia beyond which cropping isn't sustainable. In the East it's the Great Dividing Range. Some on this forum have raised the interesting possibility of a megaproject to pipe water through the range to green the desert.

Sadly most capacity planning projects are flooded by their completion- suggesting that population is the issue- Malthus raised this issue which is psycho-social and due to exponential breeding- Asimov called it Psycho-History (somewhat contentious).

This is interesting-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

There's a chart- Evolution of the six Psychogenic Modes in advanced nations.

Maybe you Hasbeen see something that I don't. I try to read your posts expeditiously to understand the chain of rationality.

It appears Torballea is relatively near Bundaberg a high rainfall area near the coast.

Steele Redux

Yes, I am very familiar with the Otways and the closure of its timber industry which was announced by the Bracks Labor Govt approximately 3 weeks before the October 2002 State Election. The Otway Ranges encompassed around 160,000 hectares of public forests, of which 22% was designated for wood production, with just 250 - 300 hectares being harvested per year. This was supplying 27,000 m3 of sawlog/annum to the local industry which had been just assessed as a sustainable volume

In a later Labor Party review of their election winning performance, a senior Government advisor stated categorically that the announced closure of the Otways NF timber industry to facilitate declaration of a new Great Otways National Park, was a strategy to attract Greens preferences in inner Melbourne electorates.

I'm not saying that their haven't been instances of sawlogs being sent for woodchipping such as you have mentioned, but it is fanciful to suggest that it is of such significance to close an industry either in the Otways or everywhere else around the nation which you seem to be implying. In fact in many cases, closed timber industries had no access to woodchip markets, such as the red gum industry in northern Victoria (which was 80% closed).

I worked in Tasmania for some years for an export woodchipping company, and the state forestry agency used to have an inspector at the weighbridge checking whether sawlogs were amongst the logs arriving to be chipped. Out of 1 million tonnes of pulp logs that went over that weighbridge in one year, I can remember they found just 13 tonnes of sawlog.

That said, I know it was a more significant problem in the Midlands region of Victoria for a time, and I think it was estimated that perhaps 5% of the chipped logs could have gone to a sawmill if more time and effort had been invested in cutting small sawlog quality sections out of larger mostly-pulp logs. But as I said, this was not the reason that the industry was closed.

Steel Redux

Further to your other points:

Clearfelling is strongly preferred in wet Mountain ash forests such as those in the Otways, because it allows an burnt ash seedbed to be created under full sunlight. Selective logging does not, and the distant past history of the Otways features forests degraded by selective felling because of poor or no regeneration occurring in the gaps between retained trees.

There are record hardwood woodchip exports because the plantations established during the MIS era are being harvested. Plantations grown for only 12 - 15 years specifically to produce woodchips are different to older native forests that grow larger trees for sawing and other uses. So your claim that these record harvests undermine what I said about native forests is simply wrong.

The fact that removing an industry that supplies man-power and machines with experienced operators to the fire-fighting effort is just common sense that has been widely acknowledged, including in the 2009 Royal Commission report, and the recent Victorian Govt inquiry into the 2019/20 fire season. You won't find it in the literature produced by mostly ANU ecologists with no fire experience, who are pursuing an agenda of trying to blame timber harvesting for recent bushfires. They wouldn't admit to something that would undermine their agenda would they.

Canem Malum, if you did a little more research you would have learned that it takes more than water to grow anything useful. Much of the area around that Hervey Bay/Torbanlea & hundreds of miles north of Bundaberg is coastal Wallum country. Highly acid & poisoned with aluminum it won't support even the humble gum tree, & is mostly garbage Tea tree & Banksia scrub. Some have tried to produce Tea tree oil, but it needs better country to be economical.

The only man I know of who made this stuff, & the transitional areas which are mildly less bad productive, used 4 ton of lime to the acre, after clearing to establish Rhodes grass, then a ton & a half every 2 years to overcome the low PH. I very much doubt it ever returns the cost of this improvement.

Rainfall is very varied, & it is only when a couple of consecutive high rain fall years occurs that even native seedlings survive, as I mentioned earlier.

You really do need to do a bit more research, Queenslands best grain country is in the treeless plain area, a couple of hours drive west of the Great Dividing Range, All dry land farming. I doubt the people of Young NSW, dry land producing most of the countries cherries would agree with you either.

Dear Mark,

If you really were familiar with the Otways then you would have known another one of the more substantive cases against clearfelling the mountain ash forests in the Otways was the impact on water supplies.

OREN was able to show that the meagre royalties from native forest hardwood was in not way commensurate with the value of the water foregone.

Applying the Kuzera Curve to supposed 80 year rotations in catchments showed substantially reduced water yields.

The 22% you spoke of was mostly in high rainfall mountain ash areas thus was way more impactful.

This from you is telling:

“Clearfelling is strongly preferred in wet Mountain ash forests such as those in the Otways, because it allows an burnt ash seedbed to be created under full sunlight. Selective logging does not, and the distant past history of the Otways features forests degraded by selective felling because of poor or no regeneration occurring in the gaps between retained trees.”

Degraded only in the eyes of someone like you? Clearfelling with its accompanying weed spraying created monocultures with little biodiversity. The few remaining big mountain ash giants in the wet old growth forests are testament to a forest which was not often impacted by fire and the biodiversity in those areas is stunning.

You might have to face facts mate, people are valuing places like the Otways for many other things like tourism and water etc than just their timber resources, and that is fine.

The billions in foregone tax to support a burgeoning plantation industry should allow us to step away from old growth native forest harvesting. We should be getting value for that money.

Might be time to move on.

Finally.

I am more than happy to acknowledge the potential loss of machinery and skills was touched on by the latest inquiry:

“OBSERVATION 4.3 The timber industry provides an important support capacity to fire management in Victorian forests with a skill set, knowledge base and operational experience in forest landscapes. The cessation of native forest harvesting by 2030 poses challenges for the fuel management program and bushfire response capacity across the state. Planning currently being undertaken by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning should be supported and continued to ensure the skills, knowledge and equipment of the industry remain accessible to land managers and fire agencies.”

But that certainly doesn't allow for any conclusion by you that it was: “significant factor in the increasing incidence of mega-bushfires over the past twenty-years"

Steele Redux

I could go on arguing like this for a long time, but I was asked to write about why we have a timber shortage, and the reality is that a part of the reason why we do is the banning of all timber production from huge parts of our native forests to appease the sort of preservation ideal that you are espousing.

Yes, plenty of people think like you, but there are also large segments of society that value hardwood timber products and want them to still be available. The really sad part is that we can have both nature conservation and still supply timber from only a small portion of the forest, and this is essentially the situation we still have, but unfortunately it seems that total elimination of wood production is the aim of idealistic and influential environmentalists.

You are right that the 22% available in the Otways forests were obviously concentrated in the productive forests where the better trees grow, and that does correllate with higher rainfall. However, the amount of annual harvesting was so proportionally small, and area limits were applied to particular catchments to further minimise impacts on water yield, that the effect was not regarded as significant. I can recall the Otways Hydrology Study done by Sinclair Knight Merz in 2001 which confirms that view.

BTW... you don't know as much as you like to make out if you think there is weed spraying associated with clearfell-burn-sow silviculture in mountain ash forests which progressively regenerate back to their pre-harvest biodiversity. You seem to be confusing this with plantation establishment.

You are entitled to your views, but those who have campaigned to remove native forest harvesting from forests are effectively accountable for our now gross over-reliance on imported tropical hardwood timbers from Asia-Pacific rainforests, which are associated with far greater environmental impacts than were ever associated with our domestic industry. Surprise, surprise when those countries decide not to export to us, we are in trouble despite having the sixth greatest per capita forest cover of any country in the world.

Stele Redux

Furthermore, you still talk as though old growth forests are logged, when that hasn't happened for decades in most places, although a more recent ban in Tasmania where it was happening on a proportionally small scale.

Re fire and the timber industry, you'll just have to accept that those like me who have been around for 40-odd years have seen the effect that losing most of the industry has had. For example, in the mid-1980s in Vic, there were 135 contracting crews scattered around the bush working each summer and available for rapid deployment to any nearby fire. Now there are about 25, and there are large parts of the state, such as the Otways, where there are none. That makes a big difference in reducing the chance of controlling fires while they are small.

Hasbeen- Your knowledge of the locale is greater than mine. Also I'm not a farmer. I understand that plants have a set of essential nutrients (like humans do)- from what I understand they include Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus- soil is made of sand, loam, clay- as you've said there is ph and poisons too.

Perhaps I was incorrect in my assumption that the rain would fall in the lee of the mountain range and hence there would be a rain shadow beyond. Perhaps there is irrigation that supports the dry land farming- though I'm aware that some crops are better in drier locations.

http://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/rain-shadow/

Though I suspect that there is still a line that defines the desert or semi-desert in the middle of Australia beyond which it's difficult to grow crops without irrigation. Others have talked about similar lines in history.

Though not a compulsion- please let me know Hasbeen if there is anything you can add to my understanding.

Perhaps reference to the rationale for the mid 1960's softwood plantation expansion and 1980s the Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement with New Zealand would be helpful.

The expansion of the softwood plantation estate on public or land purchased by State and Territory governments, largely funded using Commonwealth funds, was a response to the earlier work by the Commonwealth body, the Forest and Timber Bureau. This work forecast an inability of then current forest estate, in all its' forms, to supply the wood products required in Australia into the future. This forecast largely ignored the option of meeting demand by imports.

The 1982 Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement with New Zealand to create a 'single market' had many players in the sector recognised the 'wall of wood' that could or would flow from the NZ as their plantation came into full production. Noting that the NZ radiata pine estate was historically largely funded using government funds. Why burden the local economy with funding wood production when it can be more cheaply purchased elsewhere, and focus on other commodities where there Australia has a comparative advantage? Iron ore for example?

There appears to be two completing paradigms, self-sufficient to ensure national security and sovereignty or seek to create an economy based on best net comparative advantage. Ironically, the export of wood chips or logs from eucalyptus plantation appears to be an example where Australia has a comparative advantage, supplying an excellent feed stock for paper production, in terms of quality and delivered cost.

I would suggest the 'save-the-forest' ideology has masked this apparent conflict.

Given that across all sectors of the economy, worldwide, the move to a carbon restrained world now should prompt decision makers to rethink and re-calibrate policy and approaches to the supply of timber.

Perhaps this is an unlikely outcome given the extent decisions makers at all levels in government and elsewhere, are battered and bruised by decades and decades of ‘forest debates and agreements’

Dear Mark,

SKM reflected, without a direct quantitative basis of any kind, that the expected 20% reduction in streamflows of the standard Kuzera Curve could instead be between 5 and 15% for the Otways given the soil capacity for water retention.

A bit of classic SKM. They are generally pretty good with honouring the data when it is present but tend to lean toward the hand that feeds them when they have wriggle room. To be expected to some degree.

And the modelling was very dependent of the future logging figures of the department which were markedly conservative compared to what they had been doing up till that point.

Even so it showed the intended logging regime for the following decade was 11% of Geelong's primary drinking water catchment the West Barwon. This is hardly “proportionally small” especially given it takes over 100 years for an area to return to be producing proper amounts of water.

As to the weed spraying I should have used 'weed'. Many of the trees that were treated with roundup were native, but they had to be poisoned because of the shading they produced on young planted mountain ash trees.

And it is interesting you would use this phrasing: “Surprise, surprise when those countries decide not to export to us, we are in trouble despite having the sixth greatest per capita forest cover of any country in the world.”

Japan has over 60% forest cover but here in Victoria it is around half that including plantations. We have about 15% of the original native forest coverage. So why are you using per capita figures? If a country has a small population size compared to land area should we be logging that to within an inch of its life? That is silly.

A lot of Japan's cover is plantation too but as one Japanese student told me 'why would we cut ours down when we can get pulpwood so cheaply from Australia'.

We really are mugs.

Steele Redux

The reality is most of the domestic water catchment areas in the Otways were already reserved and would not be logged. It does not take 100 years for regenerated forest to return to prior water yield - esp given that the Otways forests prior to harvesting were also themselves largely regrowth from Forests Commission replanting of failed farms in the 1920s and 30s.

Also, the Kuczera curve has long been usurped by more accurate models such as Macarque which recognise differences in soil types and other site specific variables and provide far more accurate models of what happens to water yield.

Using per capita forest cover figures is a measure of the extent to which a nation takes moral responsibility for its consumption of natural wood products. Australia is in the top 5 of per capita wood consumers and yet doesn't use much of its natural forest -- granted Japan is far worse --- so we expect other countries to use their forests to meet our demand and deal with the environmental impact which that entails. Those countries have a lesser capacity to deal with those impacts than us, and have far more problematic landscapes subject to high and intense tropical rains. So, from a global perspective, we are simply not pulling our weight in hardwood production. That is largely a reflection of the 'save-the-forest' ideology that is politically dominant.

You ask why are we "logging forests to within an inch of their lives" (or words to that effect), when that has never been the case. In Victoria, it was estimated in 1986 that 31% of the public forest was available and suitable for long-term timber supply. Within about 15 years, the development of regional forest management plans and the RFAs, with the attendant reservation of large slabs of forest, had reduced that figure to about 10%. With the later closure of the timber industry in western Vic and reductions elsewhere, the current figure is about 6%. That means that 94% is reserved. None of this is indicative of logging forests to within an inch of their lives.

Dear Mark,

You claim: The reality is most of the domestic water catchment areas in the Otways were already reserved and would not be logged.”

Well no, the West Barwon catchment was planned to be significantly impacted by future clearfell logging. One of its most water productive subcatchments had already been hard hit and over 5 square kilometres had been planned for the wider basin.

http://www.oren.org.au/issues/water/report/6WBarwon.htm

As to the Kuzera Curve neither Watson nor Moran nor that SKM derived curve for the Otways showed a return to normal by the hundred year mark.

Nor did the Macaque model.

So why say: “It does not take 100 years for regenerated forest to return to prior water yield”?

Steele Redux
There are many Otways catchments used for domestic water supply. You are referring to one sub-catchment of the West Barwon catchment, which is a bit meaningless without the context of how much if any harvesting was planned for neighbouring sub-catchments and catchments. Harvesting here was compensated by reservation over there. The amount of thought and planning that goes into harvesting in catchments is not to be sneezed at, and taking individual areas out of context can create a misconception.

You use the term 5 square kilometres presumably to create an impression of one huge contiguous area of logging. In fact, 5 square km = 500 hectares that would be scattered across time and space. In any case, 'planned' logging is in gross area terms and overstates the actual net harvested area once stream buffers, road reserves, landscape reserves, and even unproductive or too steep sections are excluded.

I don't believe the Macarque model was ever applied in the Otway forests. It was first used in 2000 in the Thomson and other catchments that supply Melbourne's water, and came up with quite different conclusions to the previously used Kuczera curve.

Overall, your fixation on the Otways wood production forests which at the time the industry closure was announced in 2002 comprised just 35,000 hectares out of the ~10 million hectares of public forest nation-wide that was available for use at that time, seems to be predicated on its issues applying everywhere. They do not. And if not for political expediency, how else do you explain the millions of hectares where timber production has been evicted despite it being low impact selective harvesting on flat ground far removed from water catchments? Eg. the river red gum forests of Vic and NSW, the cypress pine forests of NSW and QLD, the list goes on...